8 ms·

Entire Google search result pages are now ads

125 points by freediver 6y ago

a3n 6y ago
Duck Duck Go, https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ It's good enough. And when you don't get what you want, you can use the google bang code, !g in front of your search. DDG should be your default.
- cbo100 6y ago
  apart from a small blurb from wikipedia on the right, DDG is the same as the google result.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  With my adblocker off it doesn't seem all that different in having mostly ads and a map on the front of the page.
  - ivanfon 6y ago
    DGG lets you disable ads in the settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general But the main difference is that DGG chooses ads based only on search term, as opposed to tracking you and collecting your data across the entire net.
    - bagacrap 6y ago
      so iow, less relevant ads that are more likely to just get in the way and not be a product I want
      - lazyload 6y ago
        The service has to monetize somehow? Unobtrusive, non-retargeted aren’t a dealbreaker by any means for me, and I loathe the ads industry in general
- armitron 6y ago
  DDG is more of the same, just pushing the "we don't track you" story to the masses, which most of the time is completely irrelevant. An actual new search engine that does its own indexing is sorely needed.
dimator 6y ago
I'm curious what kinds of sites people think should be returned for a search term of "mattress", if not mattress shopping sites?
- grawprog 6y ago
  Comparisons of mattress materials or brands, histories of different mattresses used by cultures, forums for mattress aficionados, tutorials for making your own or modifying mattresses, general mattress information or facts, other random weird shit the internet used to have about strangely niche subjects that have way more people dedicated to them then you'd expect you'd only discover by searching random terms then you find there's a whole world of weird things dedicated to this niche topic, say mattresses in this case, that you'd otherwise never know about.
  - teruakohatu 6y ago
    "mattress forums" find me forums. "mattress history" gets me a page entitled "The History of Mattresses" followed by Wikipedia.
  - cbo100 6y ago
    Then perhaps try searching "mattress materials", "history of mattresses" or "mattress making tutorial". Plenty of relevant results, zero ads. When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      So, if I want a page full of ads, by yours and the other commenter's examples, I should have to type in 'buy mattress' or 'mattress shopping' shouldn't I? Why should just searching the word mattress imply I'm looking to buy one? Ideally, if I search for just mattress, I should get a little bit of all those things in one search, including a few ads to buy one, but it shouldn't be everything.
      - johnday 6y ago
rolph 6y ago
there is always this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615 kinda stuff being posted here and it gets approximately zero traction So how else do you expose the ad to eyes other than getting meta by making postings like GP?
MattGaiser 6y ago
Sure, but if you are interested in buying a mattress, are those not where you generally want to go anyway? I suspect the mattress hobby community is not very large.
- 0x00000000 6y ago
  I go out of my way to avoid clicking on ad results and buying things that are heavily advertised (certain VPNs, audiobook services etc) because if they are trying that hard to push ads, it is almost certainly shit targeted towards uninformed consumers. Those results are not the best value or most popular or highest rated or most comfortable or highest quality. They are the ones with the most money blow on internet ads.
- freediver 6y ago
  To begin with the searcher never indicated they are interested in actually buying a mattress (for example by saying 'mattress price' or by clicking the shopping tab). Now maybe Google infered that for them, right or wrong. The problem then becomes that what is presented is not mattress-buying information which could for example consist of information about different mattress types, reviews and discussions (how many of you would be forced to actually type 'mattress reddit' in this scenario?). Instead it is a page full of ads. It does not help the searcher make a buying decision. It actually makes their job harder with so many options to choose from and very little condensed information to help with the choice. All those brains and AIs at Google "organizing the world's information" are nowhere to be seen as literally all the cognitive load is transferred back to the searcher. What is wrong with that is that Google's mission states "organize the world's information" (and this was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that) while what Google actually did was "organize the world's ads". Sad thing about it is that there was a point in the past when that was not the case.
- sytelus 6y ago
  No. Mattress business is one giant hornet's nest where deception, false claims and high margin are norm. Most companies who sale mattress actually don't do squat of real research or improvement or even own design but they keep claiming to do so. Their entire business depends on attracting customers through false ad and making them spend $1000+ mattress which takes a fraction of cost to make it. Their major expenditure is literally these ads. There are few other businesses where organic results would be more appreciated by customers. I'd personally spent months in to digging through this garbage and ultimately settled on my chiropractor's recommandation while making sure he used exacly same mattress on his own bed. There is no sane way left to buy a mattress on Internet.
maest 6y ago
This is a great way for Google to make all the margin of mattress sellers.
buboard 6y ago
on the bright side, it's now easy to compete with google
- musicale 6y ago
  I'd like to see someone develop a search engine that was optimized for finding web sites based on categories, such as non-commercial, enthusiast, blog, academic, companies, merchants, etc.. My favorite google flavors are google scholar and google news, which seem to more or less do what they say. Too many search engines seem to have crowded out the web search function with widgets for ads, local properties, wikipedia, media companies, etc..
thebean11 6y ago
If you scroll down on that page, pretty sure there are non ad results. Seems disingenuous to say it's the entire page.
- willcipriano 6y ago
  With infinite scrolling what's a page?
  - em-bee 6y ago
    a screenfull. so therefore, if all i see is ads at first, it's entirely reasonable to claim that i get a page full of ads.
  - thebean11 6y ago
    Is google infinite scrolling for you now? I still have the old "Gooooooogle" thing at the bottom
rkagerer 6y ago
I would really love a search engine or keyword that lets me exclude pages with ads (or too high an ad-content ratio).
cercatrova 6y ago
Everyone should be using uBlock Origin. There is no reason to see ads anywhere on the internet.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  That, or send your search data somewhere else.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  There is, not willing to pay for content.
  - jka 6y ago
    Can you think of any content (software, for example) that is produced without advertising?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      No, but that doesn't mean content producers have other sources of income, specially when those consuming it aren't willing to pay them.
      - jka 6y ago
        Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production. Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
        aabbcc1241 6y ago
        I've seen some ad-free alternative, but they usually have much less budget on promoting themselves, so harder to reach the critical mass (for network effect)
    - aabbcc1241 6y ago
mthoms 6y ago
Reminder: it's been 4 months since Google said they would roll back their ads with favicons. Surprise! Nothing's changed. "Every Google result now looks like an ad" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 "Google backtracks on search results design" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210
- gundmc 6y ago
  I don't see any favicons on my desktop search, which is what the links reference. Mobile favicons had been around for some time prior to those articles and continues to have them.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    Interesting. I'm still seeing them. Are we talking about the same thing? They aren't actual favicons btw, they are composed of text with the word "Ad" but formatted and positioned to look like exactly like favicons.
    - gundmc 6y ago
      Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against. They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet). Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        Ahhh... right you are. Thanks for the correction!
olives 6y ago
I don't think the map portion of that screenshot is monetized.
Bayart 6y ago
Even when there's not a lot of apparent advertising, a large portion of the high ranking pages are ads or referral links disguised as informative content.
N1H1L 6y ago
Well didn't how Yahoo die to a certain extent? I remember back when Google first came on the scene - we were all using Yahoo. Yahoo was an ad-filled ungodly mess, while Google was clean and fast. People switched over really fast.

125 points by freediver 6y ago

a3n 6y ago

Duck Duck Go, https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ It's good enough. And when you don't get what you want, you can use the google bang code, !g in front of your search. DDG should be your default.

cbo100 6y ago
apart from a small blurb from wikipedia on the right, DDG is the same as the google result.
MattGaiser 6y ago
With my adblocker off it doesn't seem all that different in having mostly ads and a map on the front of the page.
- ivanfon 6y ago
  DGG lets you disable ads in the settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general But the main difference is that DGG chooses ads based only on search term, as opposed to tracking you and collecting your data across the entire net.
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    so iow, less relevant ads that are more likely to just get in the way and not be a product I want
    - lazyload 6y ago
      The service has to monetize somehow? Unobtrusive, non-retargeted aren’t a dealbreaker by any means for me, and I loathe the ads industry in general
armitron 6y ago
DDG is more of the same, just pushing the "we don't track you" story to the masses, which most of the time is completely irrelevant. An actual new search engine that does its own indexing is sorely needed.

dimator 6y ago

I'm curious what kinds of sites people think should be returned for a search term of "mattress", if not mattress shopping sites?

grawprog 6y ago
Comparisons of mattress materials or brands, histories of different mattresses used by cultures, forums for mattress aficionados, tutorials for making your own or modifying mattresses, general mattress information or facts, other random weird shit the internet used to have about strangely niche subjects that have way more people dedicated to them then you'd expect you'd only discover by searching random terms then you find there's a whole world of weird things dedicated to this niche topic, say mattresses in this case, that you'd otherwise never know about.
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  "mattress forums" find me forums. "mattress history" gets me a page entitled "The History of Mattresses" followed by Wikipedia.
- cbo100 6y ago
  Then perhaps try searching "mattress materials", "history of mattresses" or "mattress making tutorial". Plenty of relevant results, zero ads. When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    So, if I want a page full of ads, by yours and the other commenter's examples, I should have to type in 'buy mattress' or 'mattress shopping' shouldn't I? Why should just searching the word mattress imply I'm looking to buy one? Ideally, if I search for just mattress, I should get a little bit of all those things in one search, including a few ads to buy one, but it shouldn't be everything.
    - johnday 6y ago

rolph 6y ago

there is always this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615 kinda stuff being posted here and it gets approximately zero traction So how else do you expose the ad to eyes other than getting meta by making postings like GP?

MattGaiser 6y ago

Sure, but if you are interested in buying a mattress, are those not where you generally want to go anyway? I suspect the mattress hobby community is not very large.

0x00000000 6y ago
I go out of my way to avoid clicking on ad results and buying things that are heavily advertised (certain VPNs, audiobook services etc) because if they are trying that hard to push ads, it is almost certainly shit targeted towards uninformed consumers. Those results are not the best value or most popular or highest rated or most comfortable or highest quality. They are the ones with the most money blow on internet ads.
freediver 6y ago
To begin with the searcher never indicated they are interested in actually buying a mattress (for example by saying 'mattress price' or by clicking the shopping tab). Now maybe Google infered that for them, right or wrong. The problem then becomes that what is presented is not mattress-buying information which could for example consist of information about different mattress types, reviews and discussions (how many of you would be forced to actually type 'mattress reddit' in this scenario?). Instead it is a page full of ads. It does not help the searcher make a buying decision. It actually makes their job harder with so many options to choose from and very little condensed information to help with the choice. All those brains and AIs at Google "organizing the world's information" are nowhere to be seen as literally all the cognitive load is transferred back to the searcher. What is wrong with that is that Google's mission states "organize the world's information" (and this was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that) while what Google actually did was "organize the world's ads". Sad thing about it is that there was a point in the past when that was not the case.
sytelus 6y ago
No. Mattress business is one giant hornet's nest where deception, false claims and high margin are norm. Most companies who sale mattress actually don't do squat of real research or improvement or even own design but they keep claiming to do so. Their entire business depends on attracting customers through false ad and making them spend $1000+ mattress which takes a fraction of cost to make it. Their major expenditure is literally these ads. There are few other businesses where organic results would be more appreciated by customers. I'd personally spent months in to digging through this garbage and ultimately settled on my chiropractor's recommandation while making sure he used exacly same mattress on his own bed. There is no sane way left to buy a mattress on Internet.

maest 6y ago

This is a great way for Google to make all the margin of mattress sellers.

buboard 6y ago

on the bright side, it's now easy to compete with google

musicale 6y ago
I'd like to see someone develop a search engine that was optimized for finding web sites based on categories, such as non-commercial, enthusiast, blog, academic, companies, merchants, etc.. My favorite google flavors are google scholar and google news, which seem to more or less do what they say. Too many search engines seem to have crowded out the web search function with widgets for ads, local properties, wikipedia, media companies, etc..

thebean11 6y ago

If you scroll down on that page, pretty sure there are non ad results. Seems disingenuous to say it's the entire page.

willcipriano 6y ago
With infinite scrolling what's a page?
- em-bee 6y ago
  a screenfull. so therefore, if all i see is ads at first, it's entirely reasonable to claim that i get a page full of ads.
- thebean11 6y ago
  Is google infinite scrolling for you now? I still have the old "Gooooooogle" thing at the bottom

rkagerer 6y ago

I would really love a search engine or keyword that lets me exclude pages with ads (or too high an ad-content ratio).

cercatrova 6y ago

Everyone should be using uBlock Origin. There is no reason to see ads anywhere on the internet.

m-p-3 6y ago
That, or send your search data somewhere else.
pjmlp 6y ago
There is, not willing to pay for content.
- jka 6y ago
  Can you think of any content (software, for example) that is produced without advertising?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    No, but that doesn't mean content producers have other sources of income, specially when those consuming it aren't willing to pay them.
    - jka 6y ago
      Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production. Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
      - aabbcc1241 6y ago
        I've seen some ad-free alternative, but they usually have much less budget on promoting themselves, so harder to reach the critical mass (for network effect)
  - aabbcc1241 6y ago

mthoms 6y ago

Reminder: it's been 4 months since Google said they would roll back their ads with favicons. Surprise! Nothing's changed. "Every Google result now looks like an ad" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 "Google backtracks on search results design" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210

gundmc 6y ago
I don't see any favicons on my desktop search, which is what the links reference. Mobile favicons had been around for some time prior to those articles and continues to have them.
- mthoms 6y ago
  Interesting. I'm still seeing them. Are we talking about the same thing? They aren't actual favicons btw, they are composed of text with the word "Ad" but formatted and positioned to look like exactly like favicons.
  - gundmc 6y ago
    Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against. They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet). Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      Ahhh... right you are. Thanks for the correction!

olives 6y ago

I don't think the map portion of that screenshot is monetized.

Bayart 6y ago

Even when there's not a lot of apparent advertising, a large portion of the high ranking pages are ads or referral links disguised as informative content.

N1H1L 6y ago

Well didn't how Yahoo die to a certain extent? I remember back when Google first came on the scene - we were all using Yahoo. Yahoo was an ad-filled ungodly mess, while Google was clean and fast. People switched over really fast.